None of us wants to be on the wrong side of the Revenue. The Burnham government is set to use the power of HMRC to coerce us into letting complete strangers through the front door. For women especially, this is the stuff of nightmares.
As the party gathers in Birmingham to debate what the first 100 days of a national Reform government could achieve, these disclosures reveal what an abject failure their first 500 days in local government has been. If Burnham calls a snap election, voters across the country ought to take note.
Ultimately, a firm and fair approach to high street crime is also the most compassionate. Permissiveness simply allows the problem to get worse and traps the young in lives marred by crime. Investment in the institutions that hold communities together, can restore security to our high streets. It is time to bring hope and order back.
Putin probably hopes his new missiles will be silver bullets. There will be no realistic peace until next Spring or Summer, and only if Russia is successful on the battlefield. Ukraine will be a winter, but it’s difficult to see it being broken. Putin is increasingly inclined to hit Western targets, but he’s not there, quite yet.
The ‘lanyard class’ is pernicious. Not because we reject expertise, but because we resent the idea of a priesthood, whose authority rests on recognition by other members of the priesthood. And the outsourcing of responsibility this cabal enables.
People are fed up, and rightly so. We all deserve to live in a country where people who work hard and do the right thing are rewarded. Those who work hard, and who want to, should be able to buy a new house, in the place that they want to live, without having to save up for several decades.
A government hemmed in by its own backbenchers will not reform this tax unprompted, and so the louder the voice of business becomes, the harder it is to ignore, and the closer we get to a country that rewards the people who invest in it.
Tough decisions are needed to curb the welfare bill, and previous governments have faced up to that reality. Politicians of today need to do the same, or the costs will continue to rise.
There should be a healthy instinct inside government to challenge cost: do we really need this, is there a cheaper way of achieving the same result, and would we make the same choice if it were our own money?
No 10 North would inevitably reflect the instincts of its founder. I fear it would be statist, prioritising reducing regional inequality over aggregate growth, and it would be suspicious of technological innovation if this resulted in job losses. It would tend towards people pleasing nostalgic romanticism over hard-headed realities.
It is untrue to say that any government bond with a very distant repayment date is “safe”. In times like today those bonds will sell off to low prices. They can be ravaged by inflation at any point in their long lives.
Having legislated and regulated ourselves into this stagnation, largely in a fit of absence of mind, we can legislate and deregulate ourselves out. But if we’re to do that effectively we first have to diagnose what’s gone wrong.
Defence operates on many levels. The government takes care of the biggest threats and logistics; individuals take responsibility for themselves; but together we can fill the gap between them. As governments rush to ready us for the next crisis, they should spend at least as much effort readying themselves for us.
The UK has shown its independence of European political plans, and it’s future lies globally and with the Commonwealth. The EU’s future is easier to arrange without the UK as a dissenting member.
Those on the Left who maintain that all cultures are worthy of respect are also deeply hypocritical; you cannot on the one hand praise such ideas as women’s equality and individual freedom while failing to condemn those cultures that oppose such principles.